


to walk along the edge

by meikuree (rillarev)



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: 3 Things, Alternate Universe - Detectives, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Depression, Dissociation, Doomed Relationship, Drinking, Established Relationship, F/F, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Mental Health Issues, Mildly Dubious Consent, POV Second Person, Self-Harm, Sexual Content, gets kind of depressing towards the end sorry, this is really a story about annie’s depression told through vignettes loosely revolving around sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-14
Updated: 2021-03-14
Packaged: 2021-03-22 11:53:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,059
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30038280
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rillarev/pseuds/meikuree
Summary: Pieck was the cynosure of everyone’s eyes, Ursa Major in the night sky, an uncomplicated creature, loved by everyone for good reason.You came, on the other hand, with no fewer than three warning clauses about your bizarre sleep schedule and extreme taste in coffee, five caveats about the capricious state of your progress at the therapist’s office, an expiry timing on your tolerance for small talk in every conversation, and innumerable behavioural asterisks about how you acted once you were in the vicinity of a cat.Three different times Pieck and Annie acquainted themselves with each other in bed, in a modern AU where Annie is a detective with depression.
Relationships: Pieck Finger/Annie Leonhart
Comments: 12
Kudos: 15





	to walk along the edge

**Author's Note:**

> an instance of The Discord Made Me Do It. this is inspired by a modern AU that [lesyeuxdelilith](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lesyeuxdelilith) and [tarotqueen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tarotqueen) came up with in the mikannie discord, where Annie is a detective in a relationship with Pieck. see the endnotes for more explanatory notes about this AU. big thanks and credit goes to them for fleshing out many of the details i've used here, and for sharing their AU!
> 
> for obvious reasons, please heed the tags and warnings; the mildly dubious consent warning is applied for a single instance towards the end when one of the characters is initiating sex with someone who's in a bad mental state.

> & who among us has not felt the urge to back   
>  away from life ? Sometimes the light is just light. It flashes   
>  through the cracked corpse sitting on the windowsill.
> 
> [...] I think dreams must be nearly true. Close to truth.  
>  _Almost._ The word tells us to remember the body: _right here._  
>  To shape the dough & let it rise, touch its skin in the dark.
> 
> To walk very close along the edge & feel  
>  between each world. To go out into the cold  
>  & almost not come back.
> 
> — “that there is tenderness”, Janan Alexandra

**i.**

Something in you had dared to hope, the day you looked at Pieck and saw her, truly saw her properly, for the first time in a while. Life had been on the up and up for once, and you were in one of your better states of mind. No more cloud of gloom hanging over your eyes. No more of the pins-and-needles dread that usually dogged your every step. No more of the fatigue that made every movement feel like an excruciating expense, or a searing punch stripping you to the bone. Your job was finally making sense. All the dominos of your clues and newspaper clippings were sliding together with a natural effortlessness at last. And it had seemed the same would ensue for your life as well, for a while.

It was another one of those occasions where she’d come over to your place. Before, you had not seen her as often as you would have liked; your unpredictable schedule as a criminal detective made sure of that. But you had been making more of an effort lately, spurred by advice your therapist had given you about letting your gestures speak for you, since those were plainly your strength. And so there had been a relaxed sort of compromise for a while, struck by two people humbly making the best out of their situation. Whenever you worked from home, puzzling out the next steps for your cases at your desk, she would drop by after her stints at the zoo like a quiet phantom. She knew your rhythms by now, and she usually tried not to intrude too much— something both of you were conscious of. She was often content simply to bask in your presence as she read a book on the couch, humming to herself.

You didn’t understand why she would want to, when she likely had better people to be spending time with, but it was one of those things you were trying to stop questioning at the time. Simply another aspect of love’s mysterious mercies, you supposed.

That was back then, though. Things were different now. _You_ were different, you had resolved. You were on the mend: more open and responsive, and now somehow a living and breathing creature, the genuine article rather than an imposter wearing the mechanical costume of a heaving chest and lungs. When Pieck dropped in through the door this time, the atmosphere was noticeably lighter between the two of you, and you intercepted her with a sudden hug. (“Annie!” she had exclaimed with a laugh, as she rubbed at your back.) You had even made her coffee the way she liked it: black, with exactly fifteen grams of sugar. Because you were now feeling— almost like yourself again, no longer a stranger to your own senses, and hence also more present to the people around you.

As well as more alert and rapt to the shifting shape of something between both of you.

It happened like this: you had seated yourself at your desk, poring over the grey literature of the day and your notes, with the city’s polluted lights backgrounding your view in the windows. The orange onset of the inchoate evening was visible through the glass too, and the dying sun was throwing alternating strips of five o'clock shadow and translucent ember-light into your study room. She suddenly came up to you and wrapped her arms around your shoulders, nosing at the straightlaced flax of your hair. You put down your pen beside your cigarettes and jagged mountain of files and sat upright, leaning backwards lightly into her touch, enjoying the feeling of her wispy hair tickling your neck.

“You're working too hard,” she muttered, and then there was something to the effect of _I can think of better things to be doing with you_ being murmured into your hair. The faint scent of her lavender fragrance, curling around you. You made a small, indignant sound in your throat, but there was no true weight behind it. Carefully, you raised a hand to cradle the edge of her elbow, in one of the newfound vocabularies of your softer gestures. You were slowly getting used to them, after a lifetime spent with the domain of fighting stances and rough kicks under your father’s insistence.

When she said, “Turn around,” her breath warm against the rim of your ear, you did so in your chair, happily obliging her— and soon found her mouth on yours, kissing you. It was light and gentle at first, the tentative check-in of a considerate girlfriend; but you were quickly bringing both your hands up to cup her face and deepen it into a hungry kiss, pinning her to you by the strength in your palms alone, and she let out a hum of appreciation and surprise both.

When you tried to separate to catch your breaths, you found that her three day-unbrushed hair had gotten tangled in your black-rimmed glasses, and was now tethering her face close to yours like a stubborn chain. There was a pause, then laughter as both of you cracked up at the sight. You were reminded of the simple power of sharing a moment of private joy together. All the tension diffused into a comfortable camaraderie between you, wrapped warm and thick as honey around you.

But the old Annie would not have dithered, and so you were soon whipping off your reading glasses in a decisive motion, untangling her hair from the frame along the way, and setting the glasses hurriedly down on the desk. The next steps came from the better part of your inspiration, seamless and natural. With one hand gripping her shoulder you walked her backwards into your room, to reconnect with her in the only ways it would matter now, unearthed from between the lines and between your sheets.

The situation was a little cramped and dusty there, but you made it work. Once you were sat down on your bed, you ceded control to her. You were out of practice, and possibly a touch too breathless. Everything about this was almost perfect otherwise, because both of you were sober to boot. Her face was refreshingly unclouded by the haze of indica, and you were clear-minded despite the chemical soup of antidepressants sloshing around somewhere in your mind.

So this was what it was like to be in the same realm as the concept of functioning, you thought.

She was happy to set the pace, moving leisurely. She was now peeling your clothes off you like the layers of a chrysalis: first your cotton-grey vest came off, then the buttons of your shirt— which she had in fact bought for you, you belatedly remembered— then the constraining cuffs of your sleeves, until finally your undergarments were left, and taken off with a kiss to your hips.

What was left at the end— what emerged like a refashioned self— was the unfamiliar expanse of your pliant and vulnerable flesh, warm and aching to be touched. Something elemental and banal, and yet startling, because this was perhaps the true fact of what you were at heart, beneath the stiff lockjaw of your usual posture and layers of unflinching bullshit you constantly put everyone and especially Pieck through. You were simply the soft animal of your body, a creature that could be pared down to the valences of your yearning.

You had done this previously with her, of course, but the last time had been something like two months ago, because you had been easing into a new dosage of citalopram soon afterwards, and your moods had gone too haywire in that time for you to attempt anything resembling this. But that was something to put behind you for now. There was something to be said too, for how that distance now gave your contact a certain thrill of novelty, made each sensation feel exciting. Like going back to an old case with new eyes, and seeing many fresh details you hadn’t noticed before. Like rediscovering an old lover. So: a blessing in disguise.

Pieck had other lessons planned that way. Her face was now a hushed breath away from yours. She was looking at you reverently, though you could see clearly from her face— warm but a little guarded— that she was going slow because she was afraid of hurting you. Closing her eyes, she dipped her head to nuzzle kisses into your neck and ribs, coasting her fingers across your breasts. The weight of her hips against yours was a welcome counterpoint to the turmoil you would have ordinarily been wracked with, calming your breath down. You sighed quietly, intending it as encouragement, and raked your fingers across her scalp, pressing a fond kiss to her head afterwards. It emboldened her, and she began nipping at your skin with her teeth, leaving bruises that made your body shiver a little at the collision of her hunger and your flesh.

It occured to you that this was how everything could be, if only the fog over your mind would lift, if only some esoteric mechanism at the centre of your life locking you up would let go and relent, if only you could be a warmer and better version of yourself to your girlfriend all the time. It sent a pang through your heart. Almost.

The people close to you were often willing to give you the benefit of the doubt. Pieck in particular went to great lengths to stress that you had to be kind to yourself; it was your depression, hardly your fault, and your depression was not you. But you were sometimes unsure of that. The boundaries between the vicissitudes of your illness and the presence of some inherent flaw within yourself felt ill-defined in truth, porous and melding unto each other. Perhaps there was no division, and everything had truly been your fault all along.

But you tried to ignore it. You tried to sublimate the guilt, or to harness it to put more effort into the moment. You decided for both your sakes that she was clothed one layer too many, and briefly held her down to pull her black camisole up over her shoulders. _A better lover_ — you were repeating that mantra in your head now, as a reminder or something you wanted to live up to— and so you moved to repeat on her skin all the things she had been doing to you. But there was suddenly a hand braced upon your arm, stopping your motions just as you were wrapping your palms around her waist. You looked up with an arched eyebrow.

“No,” she said, peering down at you with a gentle smile, “this isn’t about me. This is about you.”

“It can be both,” you pointed out, even though you knew the real reason for her apprehension. You had previously been in the habit of beating yourself up after failing to return favours in bed. Always another notch in your tally of why you were a stain on human decency. (And then she would have to remind you: relationships were not solely or even mostly founded on transactionality.)

“So it can,” she agreed, “but only if you’re sure you’re up for it.” The question was left unspoken, hanging at the end.

“I am,” you replied. And then you repeated it, with greater conviction: “I am. Please don’t worry.”

She visibly relaxed then, shoulders losing some of their tension. Her voice was thick with emotion when she spoke, sounding just a fraction as though she wanted to cry from relief: “Good— but can I have my way with you first?”

Your response to that was a kiss, and it said everything enough for both of you.

She slid down your body as easily as water, her hair a waft of midnight cloud fanned out over your thighs. There, at your core, she settled like she had found home. She was soon coaxing pleasure out of you like a riptide with her mouth, and simultaneously interlocking her mildly work-callused hands with yours. It allowed her to feel every clench and tremble that passed through your fingers. She was the gentler one, and yet you now felt like you were being pinned like a butterfly in a glass case, open and on display for her.

When climax came it felt not like death, as you had expected, but the liberation of something reflexive inside you, an amnesty from the slings and arrows of your tortured mind. You couldn’t remember why you hadn't wanted to do this more often before.

After she was done, easing you down slowly, you turned her around and pinned her by the wrists to your sheets. Both of you were flushed, you more than her, but you observed her with the same cool intensity you often used to pry apart the final pieces of an investigation, when it was at your mercy and you saw through every detail with searing transparency. In other words: you were taking advantage of the opportunity to soak her in. You catalogued her features almost indulgently. She had beautiful legs, you could see clearly, now that they were freed from the slacks she often lounged around in. Sparkling eyes that drew you in, now curved in soft want for you. And an inviting arc at her ribs you wanted to kiss many times over.

What you did next came smoothly to you, like a bout you instinctively knew the motions of. You found yourself kneeling before her beside the bed, kissing your way up her thighs, sensing the way her muscles rippled beneath your mouth.

You let her settle down first, waiting, feeling her watch and anticipate your next move.

Then you slid in, three fingers deep inside her, and began to fuck her relentlessly into the mattress.

It ended up being a captivating sight, watching her come apart. She trembled beneath you like a willow in the eddy of a fierce gale. Her hands were gripping hard onto your shoulders now to anchor herself, fingers almost indenting bruises into your flesh. An encouraging fact. Thank god for upper arm strength. Thank god for your nail-biting habit. Thank god you could still master enough presence to remember what her bodly liked. It was simply a matter of retracing the steps, of thumbing over impressions of instinct now bobbing up to the surface. She was bringing a hand up to muffle her harsh pants and hitched breaths, as though afraid of being too loud, but you adamantly moved it away, staring into her eyes all the while. _I want to hear you. Let it go._

She swallowed hard, and carded her fingers shakily into your hair in response, eyes inundated with a wordless emotion. This was new to her, you supposed. New but not unwelcome, hopefully.

She let out a litany of whimpers and breathy words afterwards, none of them uttered in the name of god— there was much about you she had been keeping bottled up.

The bed bore both your weights comfortably, when the two of you finally collapsed onto it for good. She threw the comforter over you and nestled close to you, her palm on your chest. There, she cleaved to you like you were a benediction, pressing kisses all over your hardened knuckles in a way that made your hands feel unreasonably warm. You didn't know why she had so much affection for you, but you decided not to dwell on it. Love—or your approximation of it— somehow had the effect of retaliating dark thoughts. You gave a small smile and brushed her mussed hair out of the way.

“Was that good for you?” you asked, uncertain.

“Amazing,” she was saying, genuinely appreciative, eyes shining. “How did you learn to do that?” She could have been referring to any number of things: the way you had angled your fingers, your sudden responsiveness, the enthusiasm you had taken her apart with, your willingness to humour her to begin with.

You spoke with quiet pride. “I didn't.” It was the truth. It had all been yourself.

She laughed again, and kissed you— on the lips this time.

You had the suspicion that this moment wouldn’t last, against the slat-shadows and ebbing tangerine light in your room. Or that it would become another ephemeral thing to be blown away ceaselessly, like the curtain of cinereal cigarette-smoke you often surrounded yourself with as you worked. But you tried to cast all that from your mind right now. For now: comfort in your bed. For now: you were ending the evening cradling her in your arms, her back pressed against your front, gently touching your fingers to her spine as she slept. It was easy to white out the world like this. You were flush with the satisfaction of having done something right, and for the first time in a while you felt truly buoyant and happy.

You had the audacity to hope it could last.

**ii.**

The second time she tried to touch you was much less ideal, to say the least.

The city was bitterly cold these days, and you wove your way past dilapidated streets and the ramshackle shells of forsaken stores feeling the sting of high winter in your bones. You had a routine you were able to stick to for now, always heading out to interview people by eleven and coming back with groceries for you and Pieck by night, but the garroting temperatures were starting to be discouraging at times. When you fished out your debit card at ATMs your hands shook with a whalebone chill, and you had to draw your trench coat untenably close to yourself like a threadbare skin. Your world narrowed to the blinkered impulse of making it forward in life one step at a time: the sound of your curt boots striking the pavement was often all you had to guide you by outdoors, because the winter was so damned loud in and outside your thoughts.

You were always a baseline level of stressed now. You had been deemed capable enough to be given your first difficult case, after the personal disaster that had been the _Trost affair_ — that one unmitigated tragedy you tried never to think of at all costs, to debar from memory. It had set a bar you hoped would never be exceeded again. This case was apparently thinking of stepping up to be a contender. The curse of giving people expectations! — you now berated on a daily basis. Carly Stratmann was a true challenge, and not a disappearance you could have coasted through on raw intellect alone. Deduction could not in fact have saved you from this one, because Carly Stratmann was an _ethical_ problem: _she did not want to be found._ Only you could decide whether to disclose her whereabouts to her father, who could only be described as a veritable bastard, even by your standards. While she was leading your moral compass on a wild goose chase, your boss and her father were piling questions and deadlines on you like a suffocating anvil.

And beneath it you spun your wheels more and more with each passing day.

 _Professional failure_ was not a phrase you liked to entertain, because frictionless competence— which you managed some measure of even, yes, on the days you felt properly like shit— was the bread and butter of your reputation at the office, and the one lingering aspect of identity you had pride over. But you feared it these days like a looming threat crouching in the shadows, always at potential of striking. Bertholdt had tried to tell you a few times that it wouldn’t happen, that it was simply your anxious nature overcompensating. You didn’t care much for his opinion, unfortunately. But you hoped he had a point, just this once.

There were other issues, nonetheless. Things were getting harder as they always did in this season, with or without the foibles of your work to help them along. It was simply another fact of life, like the steel grip of winter, or the iron in your blood, or the impenetrable shape of your madness.

The true toll the days were taking on you only ever became apparent at home. These days Pieck was staying over at yours much more often, effectively cohabiting with you under the nose of your landlord. She had surreptitiously brought over a spare set of clothes and her possessions some time ago, and they now lived in your closet, a chaperone to your drab belongings. When she pointed it out to you, you had quietly accepted it, unable to muster the energy to protest.

She made sure to dodge the prying eyes of your neighbours, somehow. You didn't ask how, but you trusted her enough to be smart about staying with you. Some part of you welcomed the arrangement deep down, even if you were better used to being solitary. Winter was difficult enough without being alone, and two could warm the apartment better than one. The truth was you needed it. And as for her— she was worried for you.

The two of you had a ritual that involved the bathtub and many towels. As winter crooked its fingers deeper into the crevices of your spine and your work escalated to its weary conclusion, she began to come home more often to the sight of you sitting naked in the tub, immersing yourself in a shallow grave of water that had long gone tepid, your arms wrapped around yourself.

Every time, she would stand still in her coat before you, staring at you. Then she would wordlessly collect your razors from the edge, before wandering back in with heavy hands to clean the blood off you.

Her unilateral decision to stay with you had swiftly followed the first time she walked in on you in the bathroom.

After all, nobody else could have done this for you; could have insinuated themselves into the water behind you, under exposure of the clinical bulb-light, and begin wiping at your self-inflicted handiwork, warding away infection with the loving sting of surgical spirit; could have made sure you were truly, truly alright rather than performing a flippant platitude. Because you had little patience for yourself, whereas she somehow found patience enough to deal with even the worst of yourself.

You often mused, when she was bracketing your wounds with gauze, that your cuts probably resembled the gills of a market fish to her. A pity they did not help you drown any better. But it was a matter of some pride to you that you managed to keep them controlled, at least. They were always confined to your thighs or at most— on occasions when you wanted something with more blood and give— the sides of your waist. You were miserable but not stupid, after all. Any other places would have risked exposure to the rest of the world, with your despair given bodily form peeking out of your collars and sleeves. You were a sane adult, or trying to look like one.

Anyone expecting some profound, all-illuminating answer for why you were doing this would have been liable to be disappointed. Like the unsentimental pragmatism you went at it with, everything about your little habit was really quite mundane. There were the textbook reasons, yes— reasons like the stress from work gnawing at you alive or the desperate clawing for an anchor when you were feeling unrooted in your body— but more often than not you did it simply for banal concerns like being unable to sleep or needing to calm down enough to focus on your cases. It was meditative. It helped you relax _and_ gave you catharsis, all at once. Nothing more, nothing less. Adulthood had a way of flattening even the apex of your teenage dramas into droll circumambulations around necessity.

Pieck understood this quickly after the first few times she attempted to ask the natural question: why? She now accepted that it was much like a necessary evil. Something to help you get through the days. You were going to do it, with or without her intervention. You could hardly call it healthy, but the same could also be said for her proclivity for smoking contraband plants, and could anyone really lay claim to the titles of _healthy_ and _functional_ these days?

And so none of it registered as a big deal to you. The only sting you ever felt from the whole affair came, in fact, not when the cold air was nipping at your flesh, nor when the isopropyl was branding its sterilising burn into the artefacts of your bladework. It came after the event: when she had bundled you into bed with her in a loose shirt and washed your limp hair, when you would lay there in the darkness with the motestuff of your thoughts and not-thoughts, when you would then realise with a start that she had been crying silently for the past ten minutes because your hitherto-impenitent palms would come away wet when you cradled them to her knuckles behind you.

 _Don’t cry for me,_ you tried a few times to tell her whenever she was slicing vegetables or brewing coffee for you in the kitchen, or making her latest attempt to braid your too-short hair under the cover of night and your bedsheets. _It’s not worth it. It’s like, it’s like—_ it would have been like crying for witnessing a spell of bad weather or getting caught in the serpentine labyrinth of a bad traffic jam. Futile, because like these phenomena all your compulsions and neuroses were ultimately larger than either you or her, and just as unavoidable and impersonal and uncaring.

Still, something in you yielded, or broke, or softened— there were many verbs to pick your poison with, depending on the narrative around yourself you wanted to present to your therapist— after you realised you were affecting her too. That this was no longer about you alone. You quickly made a promise to speak to your therapist about it. And began to put in some actual effort to hold the sundered pieces of yourself together, instead of slapping the metaphorical equivalent of scotch tape on them and calling it a day.

Which left you where you were now, in the thick of midwinter, trying to delay your execution at the hands of Elliot Stratmann’s aggressive demands, taking stock of each day through your routines, trying to do right by her.

When it came to Pieck you freely admitted your flaws and were more forthcoming with your praise, because— it was impossible to sum up just how much she had done for you, and you of all people were most aware of that. Of the sheer debt you owed to her, which you could never hope to begin chipping away at, if you were honest with yourself. The least she deserved was for you to shed some of your reticence with her. In many ways she was one of the sole things keeping you afloat, one of the single spots of warmth you had left in these desolate times.

Pieck had forbearance that would outclass any known saint, and it was with this forbearance that she made small moves to brighten up your living space, all modest at first but eventually adding up to something greater than the sum of their parts, adding to something that startled you because you had not thought anyone would care enough about you to go to such lengths.

There were all the times she tirelessly cleared your unwashed dishes from the sink each day and then, on one of her days off, cleaned up your room until all the clothes had been put back into their right places and the floorboards were shiny instead of dust-dulled; and you began waking up in the mornings to find that there was somehow always an unfailing stock of donuts, frosted with crystals of sugar as you liked them, in the fridge. You arrived home one day to find that the heating in your room was properly working for once, no longer radiating only a sickly lukewarm ichor but distributing its density and weight evenly around, and knew right away she’d had something to do with it. The room instantly felt then much less like a drafty prison and more like the cozy corner of a fireplace, someplace inviting a human could actually have nursed a weary heart at.

And then there was the time she surprised you with a small diffuser in the corner of your room, puffing out mist that smelled suspiciously like a concoction of herbs your father would have daubed in his own space. Whereupon she revealed that it was a blend of sandalwood and ylang-ylang and lemongrass she had procured from an artisan shop in Chinatown that afternoon, all somewhat niche but also something she thought might have put you at ease, might have been a soothing touch of home. And she had guessed right: it did remind you of home, or more precisely, your father’s home away from his real home when he had displaced himself onto this foreign continent and, for reasons you still did not understand, plucked you, a changeling, from the orphanage. It reminded you, in the distant but always-approximately-there way of smoke, of where you had come from, how far you had come.

So it was better than home. It was a nod to your history, in some impressively sharp-eyed ways. It was almost uncanny how much she had understood about you from a single background detail. The gift was proof of her remarkable inferences made concrete. You thanked her, and sat near the diffuser to bask in the smells for a good ten minutes, because you hadn't seen your estranged father in over a year and this felt, for now, like the closest substitute you could access.

Life truly was the small things, you supposed, though that was hardly a new revelation— they were not a cure, not close at all, but you had to admit they helped. Slowly, as drips of your energy made their way back, you moved on to take some of the burden off her shoulders: to do some of the humdrum tasks of daily life too, and to insist to her ten times over each day that you could now handle things, that she ought to relax now. You were not oblivious either: you saw how careworn she was on the best days, run ragged from splitting her time between shifts at the zoo and social obligations and then watching over you at night. It ended up somewhat like an unspoken matter between the two of you, shafted underneath your busy schedules. But on nights lying in bed during your self-appointed honesty hour, with your head propped on a pillow and facing her, you would grasp her wrist around the carpals and point out: “Look— are you feeding yourself properly?” And then you would follow it up with a reminder: “It’s the oxygen mask principle; you can't help me if you're not taking care of yourself too.” Even though you knew full well that you were part of the problem too, with the wide-bodied piercing arrow of that guilt.

And Pieck, kinder with others but always stoic instead with herself, would try to brush it off like a trifling leaf at your shoulder, would tilt her face into the nest of her wavy hair to hide her ambivalence from you— “It’s fine, it’s fine, I’m not hungry any more most of the time—” until you grasped her by the chin, and made her swear to eat consistently, or else you would kick her back out to her place where she could have _some_ semblance of her indica habit and usual appetite back, so god help you—

It was a cheap and low shot, but it was effective.

You took matters into your own hands and cooked her meals in the early mornings and the nights still, for good measure. Like that, the two of you eked out something like a routine bit by bit— passing your days quietly, coming back at night in the seclusion of your room to check up on each other in your own furtive, unacknowledged ways. Hardly perfect by any means, but it was the closest to it both of you could have achieved.

* * *

She never stopped trying to pick up on the topic of your bathroom episodes, though.

It all came to a head one Friday evening in the trawl of the heavy bedsheets bunched between yourselves as they caught secrets and turned them up to the blanched moonlight. The two of you had struck up yet another ritual, one where you— or her, it was unimportant— would undress the other from the waist up once you were in bed and take advantage of the newfound skin to press close to each other, reveling for a while in the brush of epidermal contact and languid immensity of haptic proprioception. That it was the coldest season in the year mattered little. Both of you had always been on the warmer side once you were under the covers, bodily speaking; you because of your density of muscle and her because of— the same place she got her unerring resolve in life from, you supposed.

It started out as a compromise, since your libido had been watered down out of existence for a while. She wanted to be close to you, she said, and not necessarily even in a sexual way. Just the principle of the experience was important; the shape it took less so.

You would never readily admit this, but you began looking forward to bookending your days with your face upon her shoulder and your penitential hands locked around her back, brushing against her shoulder blades. It helped ground you a little as well, in times when you could feel yourself drifting dangerously away again. You were thankful for it.

It was on one such night when— held to you like this— she began trying to address the elephant in the room. The snow was pelting the windows in a deluge of foam, and the cars below were beeping out an angry lollapalooza chorus, but you tuned all of it out with the gentle susurrus of Pieck’s low murmurs and whispers as she traced little patterns into your skin, careful to avoid the still-fresh wounds lining your waist. She had thrown an arm around your waist and fitted herself to your side like a glove, and— why had she wormed her way into your life so comfortably, when it was probably the last thing deserving of that? you began to wonder.

Her style wasn’t to guilt-trip, for which you were appreciative. It wouldn't have worked, besides, because you were precisely the sort of person to take the wrong life lessons away from attempts at that, like learning to cover your tracks better instead of resolving the behaviour causing the issue in the first place. She opted instead for a careful openness, that was considerate about the right time and place to broach things but would never apologise for wanting to be upfront in the first place, once you were there.

She was a little different now. She had become more grim-faced, more hard-edged over the past few weeks. It was your doing. Still, she had some restraint.

“If sleep is what you’re having trouble with,” she said slowly, “would you consider other things?”

 _There has to be something better than ripping your own self apart,_ was what she meant, but she had tact.

You were still high-strung from dealing with the Stratmann case earlier that day, when you had received your fifth threatening message in a week, and feeling more than a little agitated. But you said nothing as she pushed you down onto the bed and pressed her hand to your beating heart, now jackhammering a painful rhythm, and waited and observed you in the darkness.

You took stock of the situation. You could feel a small swell of panic bubbling up in your lungs and throat and every part of you soft and vulnerable, klaxon-shrill and just as sharp. Her fingers were splayed out upon your ribs, the heat from them almost singeing you like a warrant. You felt like you’d been cornered, somehow, not because you didn’t want this— far from it— but because you were afraid she would now realise how insubstantial and not-there you really were and leave—

“I have you,” she suddenly whispered, cutting into your thoughts and lowered her head to kiss her way down your sternum, pausing in the dip between your breasts. And then she repeated, for good measure: “I have you. You’re safe. Calm down.”

So much like her to know. You could not hide anything from her, this close to her all-knowing gaze. Your blood was still roaring too-loud in your ears, but you settled, and tried to still your misaimed anxiety for the moment. With a thrum in your throat you watched as she went slow and careful, true to her word. Every touch felt like a pardon and a pledge both. When she kissed gently around your scars on your thighs it was apologetic; she was looking up as if at some unseen vantage point in the heavens, although, although— none of it had ever been her fault.

You still felt, initially, like the sounds she was drawing out of you were being ripped out of your throat. Like they did not belong out in the open, loosed from your contemptible mouth. But she rose up to kiss you and swallow your moans as well as your guilt, and there with her breath skidding hot across the crook of your neck, your ears, your mouth, every inch of open skin, you let her weight become a lifeline, a surface anchor for the most fundamental rhythm of your existence: inhale, exhale, pause. Your breathing came more easily, somehow, afterwards. It grew into a crescendo of sharp peals when you came, gasping wetly into her mouth as you clenched around her fingers.

Nothing about your situation changed afterwards; there was still the immovable bone of your professional burdens caught in your throat, that inexorable albatross around your neck. But it was a lifeline of gentleness you had touched briefly, and you slept more deeply next to her that night.

**iii.**

Third time was the charm, or rather, the unravelling of yourself.

The ticking fuse that was Carly Stratmann’s disappearance finally went off, and you were left stranded in the aftermath in a crater of your own ignominy, your own ruin. It had gone something like this: you headed into the office on a Wednesday morning, facing its four impersonal walls, and someone passed you a copy of _The State Tribune_ , conveniently folded already to the right page for you. There, your name and headshot had been plastered onto its pages in stark monochrome, accompanying the editor-in-chief’s official letter of denunciation for you. Elliot Stratmann’s work.

The rest had been history, as they say. _You_ were history.

The buzzing swarm of phone calls had started soon after. You picked up the first one only for your boss to seethe incomprehensible curses at you from the other end, on the edge of yelling at you. Stratmann had been a majority investor in the investigative firm, or something along those lines. You swiftly hung up. There was no heart left in you afterwards to respond to any of the other calls.

Carly Stratmann disappeared again soon after, for real this time. Probably vacating to the next city over to escape her father’s temper tantrums or spread the seeds of her budding drug empire further, you supposed. You were left wondering why you had bothered defending a woman you never knew all that well.

There were the well-wishers, you heard from Pieck, and none of your ‘friends’— not Porco nor Reiner nor Bertholdt— sincerely thought you had done anything wrong. The real injustice here lay in Stratmann besmirching your name unfairly. But you could not hear them very well over the sound of your own downward spiral. You had often wondered what pieces held your identity together, because after the layers of _my job_ and _perpetual brain-fog_ and some other tenuous building blocks like _muay thai_ and _third culture kid often found adrift in her own identity issues_ it all looked blurry and suspect. You didn't have to wonder any more. The disintegration of your professional life, and with it every piece of selfhood staked upon it, was not pretty.

There was grief drinking, because the incapacity of inebriation was preferable to the shittiness of being only half-functional sober. You were put on involuntary leave from work, and you spent more nights than were necessary in the same winter this had begun from, throwing open windows the colour of cognac bottle-glass and clutching your libations shakily to your coat on the floor. You were trying at all costs to liquidate the last currency of your feelings. The lapels of your coat were often wet with your tears, nevertheless.

None of this was personal, you told yourself. You were simply another casualty of modern life. Try to keep up.

But not everyone’s mistakes landed them on reputational blacklists sweeping around the entire country, so that reminder wasn't much help.

Pieck tried to do her best, but she couldn’t always be around. You slept, and slept, and slept, and _sleptsleptslept_ until the word lost meaning for you.

 _You should have saved your own hide,_ you rasped out to her on one occasion, your throat a fracture of glass and your shame. _Should have walked away._

She tried to shake you awake afterwards, saying things to the contrary, and through even your garbled grief she saw layers deeper into what you were trying to say— _no, no, Annie, I’m not going to, you are not a bad person_ — but you were inert, unresponsive.

* * *

One dying afternoon, something like two weeks after the event horizon that was Stratmann’s public letter, she tried to talk to you properly again.

 _How do I put this into words,_ you thought lamely, your mind sifting through the density of its own porosity, through the weight of what felt like all the many holes you must have burned into it with overthinking. The weight of what was in fact its nothingness. Your hand was outstretched before your face, the discoloured bruises on your knuckles a nebula of purples and browns melding in your glassy vision. You had punched the bedpost one too many times. _I feel— like a week-old corpse._

The sun was giving off an oven-baked, overripe glow that cloyed at your senses uncomfortably, that encased the city in the overlay of decay. It prickled at you, made you feel like a desiccated raisin.

Your mind resembled the pure chaos of your fridge, where your culinary marginalia and tchotchkes had gone unsorted for a week, tumbling over themselves in a senseless pattern of entropy. It had gone untouched because it was the least of Pieck’s concerns right now, amidst all the other things to sort out in the after-mess.

You’d had time to think, which was an understatement. One of the recurring questions you kept circling around, like an endless roundabout, revolved around you and Pieck.

 _There are so many other people out there,_ you’d wondered many times in the past. It was a thought you’d put off every time, when you could now take stock in the solidity of Pieck’s presence every time, and it now came back to haunt you, an unscratchable itch. _Why—_

The contrasts between the two of you were something that made you laugh, even now, even despite yourself. Pieck was the cynosure of everyone’s eyes, Ursa Major in the night sky, a hearth of a person who shone brightly. She was an uncomplicated creature, loved by everyone for good reason.

You came, on the other hand, with no fewer than three warning clauses about your bizarre sleep schedule and extreme taste in coffee, five caveats about the capricious state of your progress at the therapist’s office, an expiry timing on your tolerance for small talk in every conversation, and innumerable behavioural asterisks about how you acted once you were in the vicinity of a cat, or on another one of your regularly scheduled breakdowns. You were an aporetic trample of doubt and vulnerability and resentment over that very vulnerability and you had not figured out what to do with yourself.

She arrived home that night. After a rustle of shuffling feet and bags at the door you saw her face materialising beside you, her hair curved in a tired curtain around her eyes, studying you impassively. If she wrung her face in worry all the time, she would have lost all her muscles for it rapidly. Still, you could discern the note of anxiety in her movements, in the way she was pacing around you instead of slumping right away into bed. Her eyebags had grown deeper in the past two weeks than they had in half a year.

“Annie,” she said, “how are you.”

Rhetorical questions deserved rhetorical answers. You dragged her towards you to kiss her brusquely, because you didn't know just what you could have said. How _were_ you? — Nothing you would have wanted to talk about.

That was the breaking point for her, apparently. The end of her resolve, crumbling before you. She fisted her hands in your collar and wept a little against your chest.

She’d held on too long. You couldn't blame her. The two of you tumbled into bed. Ten minutes later she was sprawled out against you, nervelessly fretting at your hands, an entreaty in her chest. _Can we, can I, that is—_

You weren't sure what exactly this was meant to be, when you rose mechanically to cup her face and kiss her until her tears were hidden, but you supposed it could be a farewell. She helped you rid yourself of your clothes, numb layer after layer, exposing your dead man’s stance to the world. Your body felt heavy; the lightness of life had abdicated your form.

 _Why do you stay with me?_ you wanted to ask. But you didn't.

It was all fine and dandy until she spoke up while she was pressing a tear-stained cheek to the unforthcoming flesh of your abdomen. Her hair was straggling over her eyes and onto your skin, a mourning veil over the both of you.

“All I ever wanted was you,” she confessed, and it sounded not so much like an admission as a plea, the last resort of an animal trapped and caged.

That was what made your heart give out, at all the thousand revelations unfolding, because— everything was so simple, truly, if she just wanted to be with you, and yet you knew deep down that she could not keep you any more than she could keep a fruit about to go bad.

You didn't realise you were crying until she suddenly stopped, and you saw that her face was contorted in an expression of alarm and concern. “Annie!” she called out, and then said in an urgent hush, “What’s wrong?”

But you could not have told her about that, or about what you had suddenly understood, in what might have been your last good epiphany for this existence. That this was what you saw now: you had to go. Because, in the end, you were simply a trick of the light— beautiful in the moment but fated always to dissipate into nothingness eventually, beneath the undertow of your own insubstantiality.

**Author's Note:**

> quoted a bunch of different poets and writers here, including: hamlet (shakespeare), mary oliver, alice fulton, leopoldo lugones and nikki giovanni.
> 
>  **brief explanatory details for this AU:**  
>  \- Annie is a detective  
> \- Pieck works as a zookeeper at the zoo, with Porco as her colleague  
> \- The Trost affair refers to Annie's first major case, which she failed and which ended in her work partner Marco's death  
> \- A big focus of the AU is Annie's mental health issues, hence the heavy tone in this story
> 
> comments/feedback are welcome and appreciated. and as always, i can be found on [twitter](https://mobile.twitter.com/meikuree)/[tumblr](https://meikuree.tumblr.com/)


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